Image courtesy of Panel 8 Photography
As part of our mission to undertake research on our Collections and to make them more accessible to a wider audience, the Society, in collaboration with Wiley, have awarded four new Research Fellowships which provide researchers with access to the Wiley Digital Archive platform.
The Fellowship projects cover a wide range of topic areas, advancing knowledge and providing new insights on a number of key themes, including the science and technology of exploration, highlighting hidden and forgotten histories, and exploring under-researched parts of the Collections.
The projects supported are:
-
Nokmedemla Lemtur, Labour in the lofty peaks: tracing lives of high altitude porters in the Mount Everest Expeditions (1921 – 1953)
-
Maria Sebastian Sebastian, Travelling women. Depictions of the Mediterranean area in the narratives of Emilia F. Noel and Margaret Hasluck
-
Joy Slappnig, Marshall Islands stick charts and the idea of the ‘Indigenous map’
-
Jonathan Westaway, Encountering the Indigenous body in the Himalayan Borderlands: Gurkhas, Sherpas, and the embodied construction of 'Martial' and 'Mountain' Races in British India, 1890-1947
Over the year of the Fellowships, we will be sharing more information about each of the projects, new materials that are found, and how the digital archive is enabling new kinds of scholarship.
Two of the projects supported link to the Society’s involvement with activities celebrating the centenaries of the post-war Everest expeditions in the 1920s, including an exhibition and associated events programme this autumn, and a symposium and research-led workshop series, convened by Jonathan Westaway, titled Other Everests.
Find out more about our work with Wiley Digital Archives
The Society partnered with Wiley Digital Archives on an extensive digitisation programme of substantial parts of the Society’s pre-1945 Collections. The Wiley Digital Archive enables digital access to a wide variety of published and unpublished material, revolutionising access to our Collections and creating new pathways for interdisciplinary research and education, while preserving them for years to come.